Player Piano (40 page)

Professor von Neumann took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and stared at a paper clip before him, waiting for someone to say something.

“Yeah,” said the transportation chairman tentatively. “Kinda long-haired, though, ain’t it?”

“Sounded purty good,” said the security chairman, “but shun’t there be sumpin’ in there ’bout—Well, I’m no good at words, but somebody else could fix it up. I don’t know how to say it good, exactly.”

“Go on, try,” said Finnerty.

“Well, it just don’t seem like nobody feels he’s worth a crap to nobody no more, and it’s a hell of a screwy thing, people gettin’ buggered by things they made theirselves.”

“That’s in there,” said Lasher.

Paul coughed politely. “Uh, you want me to sign it?”

Von Neumann looked surprised. “Heavens, they were signed and mailed out hours ago, while you were asleep.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Paul,” said the professor absently.

“You don’t expect that they’ll really go along with us on the new controls, do you?” said the nervous man.

“Not for a minute,” said Lasher. “But it will certainly get word around about us. When the big day comes, we want everybody to know that ours is a great, big bandwagon.”

“Cops!”
cried someone from far away in the network of chambers.

Gunfire boomed, echoed and crackled in the distance.

“The west exit!” commanded Lasher.

Papers were snatched from the table, stuffed into envelopes; lanterns were blown out. Paul felt himself swept along
through the dark corridors by the fleeing crowd. Doors opened and shut, people stumbled and bumped into pillars and one another, but made no outcry.

Suddenly, Paul realized that the sound of the others’ feet had stopped, and that he was following only the echoes of his own. Panting, stumbling in a nightmare of the policemen’s echoing shouts and running footfalls, he blundered about the passages and chambers, coming again and again to barriers of dead rock. At last, as he turned away from one of these, he was dazzled by a flashlight beam.

“There’s one, Joe. Get him!”

Paul charged past the flashlight, swinging both fists.

Something crashed against the side of his head, and he sprawled on the wet floor.

“Here’s one that didn’t get away, by God,” he heard a voice say.

“Really socked him one, didn’t you?”

“Don’t pay to mess around with no stinking sabotoors, by God.”

“Must be one of the small fry, eh?”

“Sure. Whadja expect? You think this was Proteus walking around in little circles all by hisself, like he don’t know which way’s up? Nossir, boy. Proteus is in the next county by now, lookin’ out for his own sweet tail first, last, and always.”

“Sabotagin’ bastard.”

“Yeah. O.K., you, on your feet and shag your tail.”

“What happened?” mumbled Paul.

“Police. You just got brained for savin’ Proteus’ hide. Why’n’t you wise up? He’s nuts, guy. Hell, he’s got it in his head
he’s
gonna be king.”

P
AUL’S CELLMATE IN
the basement of police Headquarters was a small, elegant young Negro named Harold, who was in jail for petty sabotage. He had smashed a traffic safety education box—a tape-recording and loudspeaker arrangement—that had been fixed to a lamppost outside his bedroom window.

“ ‘Look out!’ it say. ‘Don’t
you
go crossin’ in the middle of the block!’ ” said Harold, mimicking the tape recording. “Fo’ two years, ol’ loudmouth and me done lived together. An’ evah last time some’un come on pas’, they hits ’at ’lectric eye, and ol’ loudmouth,
he just
naturally
gotta
shoot off his big
ba-zoo.
‘Don’ step out ’tween two parked cars,’ he say. No matter who ’tis, no matter what tahm ’tis. Loudmouth,
he
don’ care. Jus’ gotta be sociable. ‘Cayful, now! Don’ you do this! Don’ you do that!’ Ol’ mangy dog come bah at three in the mornin’, and ol’ loudmouth jus’ gotta get his two cents wuth in. ‘If you drahve,’ he tells that ol’ mangy dog, ‘if you drahve, don’ drink!’ Then an’ ol’ drunk comes crawlin’ along, and ol’ gravelthroat tells
him
it’s a city ohdnance ev’y bicycle jus’
gotta
have a re-flectah on the back.”

“How long you in for?” said Paul.

“Fahve days. Judge said Ah could walk raht out. All Ah had to do was say Ah’s sorry. Ah ain’ goin’ do that, ’cause,” said Harold, “Ah
ain’
sorry.”

Paul was glad that Harold was too bound up in his act of integrity to explore Paul’s troubles. Not that it would have pained Paul to talk about them, but because they were extraordinarily difficult to describe. His own motivation was obscure, the cast was unwieldy, and, Paul realized, the denouement
was still to come. Through all his adventures, he had been a derelict, tossed this way, then that. He had yet to lay a firm hand on the tiller.

The managers and engineers still believed he was their man; the Ghost Shirt Society was just as convinced that he belonged to them, and both had demonstrated that there was no middle ground for him.

When the police had identified Paul, they had been embarrassed by his I.Q., and his rank in the criminal hierarchy: the archcriminal, the would-be king of the saboteurs. There was no comparable rank in the Ilium police force, and the police had, out of humbleness and lifelong indoctrination, sent for inquisitors with adequate classification numbers and I.Q.’s.

Meanwhile, Paul and Harold passed the time of day.

“Ain’ a
bit
sorry,” said Harold. “Wha’s ’at tap-tap-tappin’?”

The irregular tapping came from the other side of the sheet-metal wall that separated Paul’s and Harold’s barred cell from the totally enclosed tank for desperados next door.

Experimentally, Paul tapped on his side.

“Twenty-three—eight-fifteen,” came the reply. Paul recognized the schoolboy’s code: one for
A
, two for
B
… “Twenty-three—eight-fifteen” was “Who?”

Paul tapped out his name, and added his own query.

“Seven—one—eighteen—twenty—eight.”

“Garth!” said Paul aloud, and he tapped out, “Chin up, boy.” An exotic emotion welled up within him, and it took him a moment to understand it. For the first time in the whole of his orderly life he was sharing profound misfortune with another human being. Fate was making him feel a warmth for Garth, the colorless, the nervous, the enervated, that he had never felt for Anita, for Finnerty, for his parents, for anyone. “You fixed the tree?”

“You bet,” tapped Garth.

“Why?”

“Boy flunked GCT again. He cracked up.”

“Lord! Sorry,” tapped Paul.

“Dead weight on world. Useless. Drag.”

“Not so.”

“But only God can make tree,” tapped Garth.

“Blessed are fetishists. Inherited earth,” tapped Paul.

“Rot, corrosion on our side.”

“What next for you?” tapped Paul.

Garth tapped out the story of his being discovered as the criminal at the Meadows, of the furor, the threats, the actual tears shed over the wounded oak. He’d been locked up in the Council House, and guarded by dozens of angry, stalwart young engineers and managers. He’d been promised grimly that he would get the book thrown at him—years of prison, fines that would wipe him out.

When the police had arrived on the island to pick him up, they’d caught the hysteria of the brass and had treated Garth like one of the century’s most terrible criminals.

“Only when we got back here and they booked me did they wake up,” he tapped.

Paul, himself awed by Garth’s crime, was puzzled by this twist. “How so?” he tapped.

“Ha!” tapped Garth. “What’s my crime?”

Paul laughed wonderingly. “Treeslaughter?” he tapped.

“Attempted treeslaughter,” tapped Garth. “Thing’s still alive, though probably never have acorns again.”

“Proteus!” called the cellblock loudspeaker. “Visitors. Stay where you are, Harold.”

“Ain’ going nowhere, ’cause Ah ain’ sorry,” said Harold. “ ‘Cayful, look out, now. Walk facin’ the traffic’ ”

The cell door buzzed and opened, and Paul walked to the green door of the visitors’ room. The green door opened, whispered shut behind him, and he found himself face to face with Anita and Kroner.

Both were dressed funereally, as though not to compete for glamour with the corpse. Gravely, wordlessly, Anita
handed him a carton containing a milkshake and a sheaf of funnypapers. She lifted her veil and pecked him on his cheek.

“Paul, my boy,” rumbled Kroner. “It’s been hard, hasn’t it? How are you, my boy?”

Paul stepped back out of reach of the big, sapping, paternal hands. “Fine, thanks.”

“Congratulations, Paul, darling,” said Anita, her voice tiny.

“For what?”

“She knows, my boy,” said Kroner. “She knows you’re a secret agent.”

“And I’m awfully proud of you.”

“When do I get out?”

“Right away. Just as soon as we can transcribe what you found out about the Ghost Shirts, who they are, how they work,” said Kroner.

“Home is all ready, Paul,” said Anita. “I let the maid off, so we could have an old-fashioned American homecoming.”

Paul could see her creating this old-fashioned atmosphere—putting a drop of Tabu on the filter of the electronic dust precipitator, setting the clockwork on the master control panel, which would thaw a steak dinner and load it into the radar stove at the proper moment, and turn on the television just as they crossed the threshold. Goaded by a primitive and insistent appetite, Paul gave her offer cautious consideration. He was pleased to find a higher order of human need asserting itself, a need that made him think, if not feel, that he didn’t give a damn if he never slept with her again. She seemed to sense this, too, and, for want of any proclivities to interest Paul save sex, her smile of welcome and forgiveness became a thin and chilling thing indeed.

“Your bodyguards can eat later,” said Kroner. He chuckled. “Say, that was quite a letter you wrote for the Ghost Shirts. Sounded wonderful, till you tried to make sense out of it.”

“You couldn’t?” said Paul.

Kroner shook his head. “Words.”

“But it did one thing I’ll bet you never expected,” said Anita. “Can I tell him—about the new job?”

“Yes, Paul,” said Kroner, “the Eastern Division needs a new manager of engineering.”

“And
you’re
the man, darling!” said Anita.

“Manager of engineering?” said Paul. “What about Baer?” Somehow Paul had expected the rest of the world to hold firm while his own life went spinning. And of that rest of the world nothing had seemed more firm than the union of Baer, the engineering genius, and Kroner, the rock of faith in technology. “He isn’t dead, is he?”

“No,” said Kroner sadly, “no, he’s still alive—physically, that is.” He placed a microphone on a table and moved up a chair, so that Paul might testify in comfort. “Well, who knows—maybe what happened is just as well. Poor Baer never was too stable, you know.” He adjusted the microphone. “There. Now, you come over here, Paul, my boy.”

“What about Baer?” insisted Paul.

“Oh,” sighed Kroner, “he read that fool letter, cleaned out his desk drawers, and walked out. Sit right here, Paul.”

The letter, then, had been
that
good, Paul thought, astonished at the upheaval it had caused in at least one man’s life. But then he wondered if the letter hadn’t won Baer’s support by default of the opposition rather than by its being unanswerable. If someone with quicker wits than Kroner’s had been at hand to argue against the letter, perhaps Baer would still have been on the job in Albany. “What was the official reaction to the letter?” asked Paul.

“Classified as top secret,” said Kroner, “so anybody trying to circulate it will come under the National Security Act. So don’t worry, my boy, it isn’t going any farther.”

“There
is
going to be an official reply, isn’t there?” said Paul.

“That’d be playing right into their hands, wouldn’t it—acknowledging publicly that this Ghost Shirt nonsense is
worth the notice of the system? That’s exactly what they
want
to have happen! Come on, now, sit down, and let’s get this over with, so you can get home and have a well-earned rest.”

Absently, Paul sat down before the microphone, and Kroner switched on the recorder. The official reaction to the Ghost Shirt Society was the official response to so many things: to ignore it, as pressing and complicated matters were ignored in the annual passion plays at the Meadows. It was as though the giving or withholding of official recognition were life or death to ideas. And there was the old Meadows team spirit in the reaction, too, the spirit that was supposed to hold the system together: the notion that the opposition wanted nothing but to win and humiliate, that the object of competition was total victory, with mortifying defeat the only alternative imaginable.

“Now then,” said Kroner, “who’s really at the head of this monkey business, this Ghost Shirt Society?”

Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner’s study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker’s gray pinstripes, all separated here.